With ASEAN leaders vowing to resume efforts this week to try to convince the Myanmar junta to engage in peace talks, The Irrawaddy revisits an article from 2010 detailing conversations among Asian and US officials regarding the previous Myanmar regime, that were contained in documents published by Wikileaks. In one conversation, former Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew describes the junta leadership as “stupid” and warns they will never engage in dialogue with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. In contrast, Chinese officials try to persuade US diplomats that the junta was interested in democratization, and counseled patience.
BANGKOK — Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew told US officials that the Myanmar military rulers are “dense” and “stupid,” saying that talking to the regime was akin to “talking to dead people,” according to documents released by WikiLeaks this week.
Ridiculing the junta generals’ mismanagement of what he termed Myanmar’s resource-laden economy, Lee said that the US should approach Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to act as an interlocutor with the junta, or failing that, sound out Vietnam as a possible mediator. Dismissing his own suitability for the job, Lee said that he was perceived as too close to the US for the junta’s liking.
Lee’s comments were made to then US Ambassador to Singapore Patricia Herbold in Oct. 2007 as the Myanmar dictatorship crushed the monk-led “Saffron Revolution” protests taking place in cities across the country. A confidential briefing on a 2007 conversation between Lee and US officials was released by WikiLeaks this week.
Earlier in 2007, China facilitated talks between the US and the Myanmar government, with Beijing’s diplomats suggesting that the US deal directly with junta chief Senior General Than Shwe, according to the documents released by WikiLeaks.
In a March 2007 meeting between Assistant Foreign Minister Cui Tankai and recently departed US Ambassador to Thailand Eric John—who was then Deputy Assistant Secretary for Southeast Asian Affairs in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs—the Chinese representative said that if the US wanted to make a difference in Myanmar, it should engage directly with Myanmar’s apex senior-general. According to the March 2007 meeting transcript, China had repeatedly urged the junta to release political prisoners and to engage with the ethnic minority groups to promote national reconciliation.
While Lee appeared to find the Myanmar rulers difficult to deal with, Chinese diplomats had a more benign view. In a meeting held in Beijing on Oct. 14, 2009, the director-general of the Asian Affairs Department at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Yanyi Yang told US envoy Kurt Campbell that Than Shwe is “easy-going” and not difficult to engage in conversation, according to words attributed to her by an American diplomat who attended the meeting. Than Shwe holds the US in high regard, said Yang, who believed that the junta was “not seeking enemies.”
More than a year ahead of the Nov. 7, 2010 election, which the Myanmar junta front party known as the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is alleged to have rigged in its favor, Yang told Campbell that Myanmar “had expressed its commitment multiple times to free and fair elections in 2010,” and “had taken positive steps in advancing the democratization process.”
Going further, Yang said that “the regime was emphasizing economic development and paying increased attention to the needs of the Myanmar people, particularly in the wake of Cyclone Nargis,” according to the US Embassy notes. In contrast, speaking months before the May 2008 cyclone, which killed over 140,000 Burmese, Singapore’s Lee said Myanmar’s generals had mismanaged the country’s natural resources, saying that China had “heavily penetrated” the Myanmar economy.
According to the American account of her meeting with Campbell, Yang “asserted that the junta was committed to building a peaceful, modern, democratic Burma” and that the Myanmar rulers “viewed positively the advice of the international community and recently had taken positive steps, including meetings by top Myanmar officials with UN leadership and a meeting between Snr-Gen Than Shwe and Senator Jim Webb.”
Webb traveled to Myanmar in August 2009, securing the release of American John Yettaw, whose unannounced visit to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s Yangon home led to an 18-month extension to the opposition leader’s house arrest. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released on Nov. 13.
In March 2007, the Chinese diplomats told their US counterparts that the Myanmar rulers were open to talking to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, suggesting that they had sought to instigate a dialogue with the National league for Democracy (NLD), her now-defunct opposition party.
However, Lee said that Myanmar’s rulers would not talk to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and that she would remain anathema even to any hypothetical younger, reform-oriented military rulers who might succeed the current clique around Than Shwe.
Counseling restraint to his American counterparts, Cui said that the “Burmese people are known for their patience, so we must take a long-term approach.” More than two years later, Yang said much the same, telling the US that “the regime could not be replaced, and long-term stability and development would take time.” She concluded that “the people of Burma could best determine the course of the country’s internal affairs.”
However, Lee opined that China remains worried about any possible unrest in Myanmar, echoing previous remarks by Cui, who said that China is “very concerned about the potential for unrest or political change” in Myanmar and implied that Beijing prefers the status quo to any form of democratization.
